The Jewish Body: A History

By Robert Jütte

An encyclopedic survey of the Jewish body as it has existed and as it has been imagined from biblical times to the present

That the human body can be the object not only of biological study but also of historical consideration and cultural criticism is now widely accepted. But why, Robert Jütte asks, should a historian bother with the Jewish body in particular? And is the "Jewish body" as much a concept constructed over the course of centuries by Jews and non-Jews alike as it is a physical reality? To comprehend the notion and existence of a Jewish body, he contends, one needs to look both at the images and traits that have been ascribed to Jews by themselves and others, and to the specific bodily practices that have played an important role in creating the identity of a religious and cultural community.

Jütte has written an encyclopedic survey of the Jewish body as it has existed and as it has been imagined from biblical times to the present, often for anti-Jewish purposes. He examines the techniques for caring for the body that Jews acquire in childhood from parents and authority figures and how these have changed over the course of a more than 2000-year history, most of it spent in exile. From consideration of traditional body stereotypes, such as the so-called Jewish nose, to matters of gender and sexuality, sickness and health, and the inevitable end of the body in death, The Jewish Body explores the historical foundations of the human physis in all its aspects.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Nov 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812297652

Book preview

The Jewish Body

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS

Published in association with the

Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies

of the University of Pennsylvania

Series Editors

Shaul Magid, Francesca Trivellato, Steven Weitzman

A complete list of books in the series

is available from the publisher.

The Jewish Body

A History

Robert Jütte

Translated by

Elizabeth Bredeck

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the Herbert D. Katz

Publications Fund of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International—Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT, and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels

(German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

Originally published as Leib und Leben im Judentum by Robert Jütte.

© Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2016

English translation copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-8122-5265-1

Contents

Translator’s Note

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Biological Body

Chapter 2. The (Un)covered and Altered Body

Chapter 3. The Sex of the Body

Chapter 4. The Intact Body

Chapter 5. The Ailing Body

Chapter 6. The Body in Need

Chapter 7. The Mortal Body

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Translator’s Note

In transcribing Hebrew letters, names, and words, diacritical marks have been omitted, both in keeping with common practice in many English-language lexicons on Judaism and for greater readability; the transcription is phonetic. Transcribed Hebrew terms appear in italics, with the exception of those that are so commonly used they are no longer considered foreign words, such as Sabbath, Kabbalah, and Torah. The names of Hebrew-language authors are spelled as they most often occur in English-language sources. Hebrew book titles in the bibliography are followed by English translations in square brackets. The spelling of Yiddish words is based on Ronald Lötzsch, Jiddisches Wörterbuch, 2nd ed. (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1992).

Unless otherwise noted, Bible passages are cited from The New English Bible with the Apocrypha (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). Biblical names are spelled as they appear in this edition. Passages from the Babylonian Talmud (BT), Mishnah, and other rabbinical texts with the exception of the Jerusalem Talmud are taken from the Sefaria and Chabad websites. The names of rabbinical texts are spelled as they appear on these websites. Passages from the Jerusalem Talmud (JT), if not otherwise noted, have been translated by the author. Dead Sea Scrolls passages are taken from Die Texte aus Qumran (1986; 2001); see bibliography.

A number of the German and Yiddish texts cited are available in English translation; in those cases, the existing translation was used, and the English title appears in the bibliography. For works unavailable in English, the original titles appear in the bibliography, and the translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

Introduction

A ssejfer on a hakdome is wi a guf on a neschome.

(A book without an introduction is like a body without a soul.)

—Yiddish proverb

What Separates a Non-Jew from a Jew?

A goy bolts out of bed in the morning, slips on his pants, splashes himself with water, falls to his knees, and stammers his prayers. Then he gets back up, takes a seat and swigs a glass of schnapps, scarfs down a piece of bread, and heads out to the street to do business. Afterward he goes back to his hovel, sits down with his brats and his old lady, eats and drinks like a pig so he can race back out again and cheat the world. In the evening he goes to church, crosses himself like a donkey, comes back to his hovel, stuffs himself again, and crashes.

But a Jew! In the morning he arises from his bed, puts on his garments, washes himself thoroughly, and stands to say his morning prayer. Then he partakes of a small drink of something and a piece of bread and makes his way outside to do business and trading…. Later he makes his way back home, sits down at the table with his spouse and little ones, may they enjoy good health, gives the blessing, eats, says grace after meals, and returns to the street to continue doing business. Before nightfall he attends the evening service in the synagogue, returns home, takes his supper, says his bedtime prayers, and lays himself down to sleep.

The goy fritters away his few years like this, croaks, and is tossed into a pit. The Jew, however, lives quietly for as much time as he is granted, then dies and is buried, laid to rest in a Jewish grave.¹

The reader of these lines, taken from one of the best-known collections of Yiddish anecdotes, proverbs, and humorous tales, Rosinkess mit Mandlen (Raisins and Almonds), is surprised at first to read the same story twice. Only the word choice and exaggeration make the life of the one person—namely, the Jew—seem more worthwhile than that of the other. As Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) observed in his book on jokes,² Jews often try to turn what is actually an oppressive experience into an ironic situation. Hence the black humor Jewish jokes are known for.

The dual perspective is surprising for a different reason as well. The Jewish conception of history long included the belief that a Jew who lived and lives in the galut, or Diaspora, was doomed to a life of trials and tribulations. Yet here we see a completely different, self-confident image. In the anecdote, the moral superiority of the Jew’s life is what elevates it above the life of his counterpart, the non-Jew living in mainstream society. The same motif occurs in a Yiddish children’s rhyme taught to ultra-Orthodox children in Jerusalem already in kindergarten: Oj, wie scheyn zu sajn a jid, oj, wie schwär zu sajn a goj! (Oh, how great to be a Jew, but oh, how hard to be a goy!). I first heard it in the mid-1980s while living and teaching in Haifa; watching a program on Israeli television, I rubbed my eyes in astonishment and wondered what these budding ultra-Orthodox people would ever experience of the world of the goyim in their later lives that were to be devoted to the study of Jewish religious texts. For you can be truly proud of something only if you also know its opposite.

In the opening comparison of a goy and a Jew, the alleged difference between them, underscored by the use of derogatory terms, is most clearly visible in their bodily practices. These include morning routines, hygiene, food intake, physical movement, and sleep, but also the end of corporeality, death. In all of these areas the Jew supposedly surpasses the non-Jew, whose life seems bleak and hardly enviable. The vivid, downright motion-based rhetorical style of the original Yiddish reinforces this impression. But if we neutralize both texts by removing the religious shading, we discover that the daily life of the Jew is hardly any different from that of the non-Jew, including their bodily practices.

The insight we gain by reading the Yiddish text against the grain has been given perhaps its most poignant expression and clever staging by none other than Shakespeare. In the famous scene from The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare—who could not have known any Jews personally—has Shylock forlornly exclaim: Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian? (3.1).³ As we know, however, this emphasis on Christians’ and Jews’ equality under the laws of nature, which also apply to the human body and mind, falls on deaf ears and in the course of the play is contradicted outright.

In fact, at the time (at least in Venice) Jews were physically almost indistinguishable from Christians, as the English traveler Thomas Coryat (ca. 1577–1617) attests. On a 1608 visit to the ghetto in Venice, he is astonished to find that here the English expression to look like a Jew has no relation to reality: I observed some fewe of those Jewes especially some of the Levantines to bee such goodly and proper men, that then I said to my selfe our English proverb: To looke like a Jewe (whereby is meant sometimes a weather beaten warp-faced fellow, sometimes a phrenticke and lunaticke person, sometimes one discontented) is not true. For indeed I noted some of them to be most elegant and sweet featured persons, which gave me occasion the more to lament their religion.⁴

What prompts Coryat to question stereotypes and popular images was for many of his contemporaries more a cause for concern.⁵ How could you recognize a Jew at all if not by his physical appearance? This worry goes back to late medieval efforts to identify Jews with the help of clothing regulations (garish colors, colors with negative connotations, and accessories such as the yellow ring sewn to their clothing). It was believed that these made it possible to instantly recognize a Jew, who often did not have the typical physical features of a hooked nose or beard.⁶ And even after conversion, in Christian circles well into the early modern period there was lingering doubt whether baptism had actually made a new Christian out of a Jew if there was no clear physical proof. Legends circulated that baptized Jews ostensibly no longer stank, something alleged of their former brethren. And if such wondrous bodily transformations were lacking, then converts had to at least adapt their bodily practices to their new environment. Especially in the Inquisition trials of forcibly baptized Spanish Jews (Marranos), suspicious bodily practices could raise doubts about the credibility of the conversion. One test, for example, involved the proper treatment of a corpse.

What to us may at first seem like an anachronism actually still plays a role in modern society. A sizable number of converts try to underscore the shift in their beliefs or religion by altering practices related to the body. Studies have been done in the sociology of religion, for instance, on American Jews who, after leaving their ultra-Orthodox parents’ homes, felt the need to emphasize this step with new body techniques (for instance, morning routines, eating patterns throughout the day, style of dress).⁷ In these cases it was apparently insignificant whether the person had merely shifted to a less Orthodox denomination or had become an atheist. Other religious communities show similar shifts in behavior following conversion.⁸ As yet, however, no historical studies have been done that explore this religious-sociological phenomenon in earlier times.

But why should a historian bother with the body at all, and especially the Jewish one? Does it even have a history?

The need to view the body not just biologically but also as something with a historical dimension has been convincingly argued in recent decades by researchers in body history.⁹ Fundamental questions of methodology have been debated, and there is no longer any doubt that the body is a social construct. Body culture studies and, more specifically, body history seek to ask questions about received notions about the body and bodily practices in an effort to find answers about social construction.¹⁰ This corporal turn in historiography has also begun to inform Jewish history. Discussion since the 1990s has focused on how the Jewish body was constructed in the course of history, by Jews and non-Jews alike.¹¹ It has addressed not only images of self and other, but also specific bodily practices that are ascribed to the Jews or play an important role in creating the identity of a religious and cultural community. American Jewish journalist Leon Wieseltier has objected that such research is banal since, after all, every Jew has a body, but his critique misses the point.¹² Wieseltier’s essentialism, which presupposes a timeless, ahistorical human physis, serves him merely as a way to promote a history of ideas that privileges (what is usually considered progressive) Jewish thinking. To take this approach is to ignore the fact that anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, but also Jewish self-hatred, are directed first and foremost at the body, not the mind. This somewhat singular and one-sided position has therefore been rightly criticized by American scholars of Jewish studies, who note, for instance, that the body of Jewish religious laws known as Halakhah itself contains many different and detailed regulations concerning techniques of the body.¹³

Let us recall how the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), who introduced this expression and incidentally came from a Jewish family, defined the term: the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies.¹⁴ So, what are the body techniques that Jews have acquired from childhood on from parents and authority figures, and what is Jewish about them?¹⁵ How have these changed in the course of a history of more than two thousand years (most of it spent in exile)? How have these practices affected the non-Jewish outside world? How have they influenced the image of the Jewish body? In this context, the question also arises of how secularization has influenced the body.¹⁶

Deliberately bracketed here is the relation between body and soul in Judaism. A whole, separate book could be written about the Jewish neschome (Yiddish for soul)—both in the literal and figurative sense. This has to do not least with the broad spectrum of Jewish spirituality, which not only includes multiple terms for the soul, but also contains, in particular, mystical elements. Think of the Kabbalah, for instance, whose central theme is the divine-human union in which the soul plays an intermediary role. Liturgical, philosophical/theological, and even medical aspects would also need to be considered. That would have been far beyond the scope of this book. I have therefore chosen to keep the strict division between body and mind that became part of natural philosophy with René Descartes (1596–1650) and which has been used ever since by many, if not all, Jewish philosophers and physicians.

The primary aim of this book is to answer a variety of questions that are almost exclusively about the body. To do so, I refer to a broad range of Jewish and non-Jewish sources. Its central focus is always the human physis in all of its facets, even if the division between body and mind—as noted above—is more of an artificial one used here for practical reasons.

A closer look at traditional body stereotypes serves as an ideal starting point, not only because these are so familiar but also because they remain powerful even today. They range from the so-called Jewish nose to the particular smell that Jews are said to have.

The fact that the external appearance can be changed, be it through clothing or particular body techniques (sports, tattoos)—of this there is particularly eloquent testimony in Jewish history. In this connection, the Zionist alternative model of the muscular Jew in particular deserves special mention.

The history of gender has also discovered the Jewish body. It addresses topics including the notion popularized in ancient Christendom, especially by the apostle Paul, that Judaism has an ostensibly carnal or bodily orientation and, correspondingly, different sexual practices (for example, in issues concerning procreation and celibacy).

The categories sickness and health are central to any history of the body. For the Jewish people these terms were and are of key importance, not only in the sense of biological terms for phenomena and processes. They also have a metaphorical meaning—think only of the anti-Semitic concept of Judaism as illness.¹⁷ But the opposite belief—that due to their religion Jews are particularly concerned about maintaining the health of their bodies—also did and does exist. How Judaism has dealt with these two anthropological constants (sickness and health), which on closer look emerge as largely social constructs, is one of the least-examined areas in Jewish history.

And finally—how could it be otherwise, given this topic?—the end of physicality: death and the transience of human life coupled with the hope of resurrection, which has a different character in Judaism than in Christianity or other faiths. Here, as in other contexts, we can trace connections to ethical issues in contemporary medicine (for instance, brain death, autopsy). The following chapters will approach these issues from an interreligious perspective and explore their historical foundations.

Chapter 1

The Biological Body

The Image of God

The human body, according to Jewish beliefs, reflects not only God (man as the image of God)¹ but all of creation as well. This idea is expressed with particular clarity in a passage of the Avot de-Rabbi Nathan, a rabbinical commentary on the Mishnah Avot that has survived in two different versions in the extracanonical addendum to the Babylonian Talmud. Here we read for instance that God created trees in order to bear witness to human bones (Avot D ‘Rabbi Natan 31). The firmament is connected in a similar way to the tongue, and almost the entire body is interpreted macrocosmically.

The medieval Sefer Chasidim (Book of the Pious), a compilation of ethical and liturgical rules of conduct, many in the form of exempla and some with arcane mystical content, goes even a step further and claims that individual body parts can foretell the future. Its author, Rabbi Judah he-Hasid, cites Job 31:4 (Yet does not God himself see my ways and count my every step?) and gives the following example: just as the number of steps in a person’s life is predetermined, so, too, does an itchy hand predict that the person is about to come into money, and an itchy cheek is a sign that the person will soon have reason to weep. God, it is argued here, allows people to foretell the future through the portents of their individual body parts.²

A Yiddish proverb goes: A blind man is sick in the eyes, a dumb man is sick in the mouth, and a fool is sick in all 248 bones (A blinder is krank oif di ojgen, a schtumer is krank oif dem mojl, a nar is krank oif alle rámach éjwerim).³ According to Jewish tradition, the human body consists of 248 bones,⁴ which the Mishnah divides into the following groups: Thirty in the foot—six in each toe—ten in the ankle, two in the shin, five in the knee, one in the thigh, three in the hip, eleven ribs, thirty in the hand—six in every finger—two in the forearm, two in the elbow, one in the upper arm, and four in the shoulder. One hundred and one of this [side of the body], and one hundred and one of that. Eighteen vertebrae in the spinal cord: nine in the head, eight in the neck, six in the openings of the heart, and five around its cavities (Oholot 1:8). It is not known how this count was arrived at. The ancient Hebrews’ knowledge of anatomy was based on a number of different sources: analogies between animals and humans; autopsies on non-Jewish cadavers, since in Judaism the dead body may not be harmed; and observations about discovered skeletal remains. The Talmud reports, for example, that the students of Rabbi Ismael cooked the corpse of a prostitute condemned to death by the Romans (BT Bekhorot 45a), separating flesh from bones in this way, just as later anatomists in the early modern period did in order to make dry preparations. This is how they came up with the number 252. The Torah scholar explains the apparent contradiction to the Mishnah by noting that a woman has two door frames and two doors more than a man (BT Bekhorot 45a). The image is a reference to the primary and secondary sex organs of a woman, which differ from those of a man. The one-sex model that American cultural historian Thomas Laqueur claims was the norm in antiquity is thus at odds with Jewish source materials.⁵ The Talmud passage quoted here even raises some doubt as to whether the number 248 in reference to the male sex is accurate. The Tosefta, another significant compilation of Jewish oral law, gives only a vague determination by setting the number of bones somewhere between 200 and 280 (Tosefta Ohalot 1:7).⁶ Incidentally, the great non-Jewish medical authorities of Greco-Roman times—Hippocrates (ca. 460–370 BCE) and Galen (ca. 126–216 CE)—are similarly cautious: the latter speaks only of more than 200 bones in this context.⁷ However, medieval physicians in the Islamic world such as Avicenna (ca. 980–1037 CE) also came up with the number 248. They had apparently learned about the Talmudic numbering from Jewish physicians, since in this case their usual source of guidance, Greek medicine, provided no specific details.

Anatomists to the present day still have some trouble naming a precise number. According to our current information, the human skeleton consists of approximately 212 bones. However, individual differences need to be taken into account (some people, for instance, have one additional pair of ribs), so in medical literature the total number can range from 206 to 214. Infants even have more than 300 bones, some of which fuse over the course of time.

The question is: why did Judaism in particular take such an early interest in determining the number of human bones as accurately as possible? One important reason is adherence to the laws of purity. According to the Mishnah, a human does not impurify [others] until his life leaves him (Oholot 1:6). Hence, if a corpse is in a covered space such as a tent, whoever enters becomes temporarily impure. This is the law when a man dies in his tent: everyone who comes into the tent, and everyone who is in the tent, shall be unclean seven days (Numbers 19:14). But how was someone to act in a case where there were only portions of the corpse? Here the Talmudic basic law applies that something greater than half must be counted as a whole.⁸ It was therefore essential to know what constituted the basic totality. Assuming that the human body has 248 bones, the critical number was thus 125 (Oholot 2:1).

The number 248 had more than practical significance in Judaism. It also had a symbolic value, one that is linked to holy scripture. In the Mishnaic period (first to third century CE), rabbinical sages concurred that the Torah contained 613 commandments, of which 365 are negative and 248 positive. The anthropomorphic creature known as the golem (magically created from clay or mud, on most accounts) is described in the Talmud with the words Rava bara gavra (Rava created a man, BT Sanhedrin 65b).⁹ In the Kabbalistic interpretation, these three words have numerological significance.¹⁰ In the original, the second word is nothing more than the first one in reverse, and a gimmel, the third letter of the Hebrew alphabet, has been added to the third. But when the Hebrew numerals corresponding to these ten letters of these three words are added together their sum is 612, that is, not quite 613. The artificial man created by Rava was thus not identical with God’s creation; he was missing one body part.

In the sixteenth century, Jewish authors in Italy and other countries published the practical guidelines to following the 613 commandments and prescriptions collectively known as the Sefer Hamitzvot. These include the Sefer Hareidim by Elazar Azikri (1553–1600). This book is unusual in that it relates the individual mitzvoth to the body, as announced already on the title page: it comments and explains the commandments for each limb according to its time.¹¹ The anonymous author of a different early modern period work, a compilation of Midrashim expositions, likewise related the 613 commandments and prescriptions to the 248 members and 365 desires of the human body. Not included are twelve so-called ministers, including the five senses and feelings such as anger and mirth. The latter were apparently taken from the six nonnatural things (sex res non naturales) in Hippocratic-Galenic dietetics that must be kept in balance to insure good health.¹²

The Sefer Yetzirah, a key text of early Kabbalah, stresses among other things the importance of the number 12 in body symbolism: The numbers in the body are the ten and the twelve (Sefer Yetzirah 5:2). According to this count, a person has twelve central organs: two hands, two feet, two kidneys, spleen, liver, gall bladder, small intestines, stomach, and large intestine. God made them like a dispute, and arranged them like a battle (Sefer Yetzirah 6:1). This description recalls the well-known political fable by the Roman politician Menenius Agrippa (d. 493 BCE) about a dispute among individual body parts over which one is the most important.

The world in miniature (microcosm), according to Kabbalistic interpretations, also reflects the world in its totality (macrocosm), which means that the internal organs, too, are included in the anthropomorphic symbolism of Jewish mysticism. This is particularly true of the teaching about the sefirot, the ten divine attributes or emanations in the tree of life (etz chajim).¹³

The sefirot are interconnected, and Kabbalah uses a number of different images to illustrate their organic relation. In addition to the tree of life, which includes roots, trunk, and branches, we often find the figure of the mythical primordial man, Adam Kadmon (Hebrew ).¹⁴ His rather less glorious likeness is the human being, who lacks the three attributes that place Adam Kadmon next to God: wisdom, majesty, and immortality.

In contrast, primordial man has all ten sefirot. His head consists of a crown—symbol of power—which is linked to wisdom and intelligence. The chest represents beauty and is connected to both the right and left arms, compassion and justice. The third triad consists of the lower body (the foundation), the right leg (strength), and left leg (splendor). The polar opposite of the crowned head is made up of the feet, symbol of the kingdom.¹⁵

The Jewish natural philosopher Abraham ben Hananiah Yagel (1553–ca. 1624) made the physical image of the ten sefirot even more concrete by assigning specific external and internal organs to them. In his version, the head consists of two eyes, two nostrils, two ears, and a mouth. That adds up to seven, which in turn refers to the seven lower sefirot that receive light and reflection from the upper ones. The four worlds of emanation (Atziluth, Emanation; Beriah, Creation; Yetzirah, Formation; and Asiyyah, Action) are also connected to the human body through their respective sefirot. Beriah, the second level, contains ten body parts normally hidden from view. Here Yagel includes the heart, lungs, esophagus, trachea, stomach, abdomen, intestines, spleen, and male and female genitals.¹⁶

According to the teachings of Kabbalist Isaac Luria (1534–72), the first phase of creation is characterized by the contraction (tzimtzum) of divine infinite being (Ein Sof). This is the prerequisite for the creation of Adam Kadmon, the primordial form of all being. Creation then proceeds from him, as divine power in the form of light streams from his bodily orifices and into the world. The second phase of creation begins since the vessels intended to contain the divine light shatter from the impact of Adam Kadmon’s light. This event is called schwirat hakelim, or Shattering of the Vessels. The sefirot are transformed in this way into five faces, or parzufim (Hebrew-Aramaic singular parzuf [ ], face; plural parzufim). One of these faces is called seir anpin (Aramaic ; literally, short/small face), which is described as a completely formed male figure with head and body. This includes the duality of left and right that is expressed in a person’s two arms, for example. Even more anatomical details are found in the Zohar, the most significant work of Kabbalah, which centers the vigor of the male between his two thighs with two kidneys and testicles in between (cf. Zohar 3:296a).

While these Kabbalistic notions about the body clearly derive from anatomical knowledge that was the foundation of Greco-Roman medicine and accepted by doctors, theologists, and natural philosophers up until the sixteenth century, they had little influence on medicine or religion in daily life. They are instead evidence of how the Jewish faith attempted to fit God’s creation into a system and create connections between mind and body, microcosm and macrocosm. Moreover, this way of thinking contributed to the view that divine will is at work in the development of illnesses. The Zohar, for example, outlines the importance of individual organs for a person’s general health, and does so in a way that is largely consistent with medical knowledge at the time (the theory of the four humors, or temperaments, from antiquity). Its uniqueness lies solely in the attempt to bring this into harmony with Jewish conceptions about God. If, for instance, the gall bladder becomes inflamed or infected, according to the Kabbalistic interpretation this could definitely become more serious if the Shechinah did not protect the sick person like a coastal sand barrier (cf. Zohar 3:234a). In Judaism the term Shechinah refers to the dwelling or settling of Yahweh in Israel, and thus stands for the presence of God among his people and therefore also for divine help in case of illness. This, for instance, is the reason that when visiting the sick, a person customarily sits neither at the head nor the foot of a devout Jew: the Shechinah is said to be at the head of the sickbed, the angel of death at the foot. The Shechinah was also believed to be a kind of divine breath of wind that wafts around all bodily organs, guarding against illnesses (cf. Zohar 3:227b). The spleen is another organ whose importance is not only cosmological. The excess of black bile that collects there and leads to melancholia, according to the four humors theory of antiquity, is also interpreted as causative in the Zohar. But unlike in the Greco-Roman macrocosm, this imbalance of the humors is not linked with the god Saturn or the planet of the same name, but instead with Lilith, a female demon described in one Jewish legend as the dreaded final angel of the ten unholy sefirot.¹⁷ Such Kabbalah-influenced images of the body remained quite popular among Jews well into the early modern period, as evidenced, for example, by the widespread use of amulets that among other things were supposed to protect against Lilith.¹⁸

Figure 1. The face of Adam Kadmon. Illuminated Hebrew manuscript. Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv, MS 151, fol. 58r.

Analogies

In the mid-seventeenth century, a number of Jewish physicians strove to share the theory of the four humors that still dominated medicine (together with therapeutic advice based on that theory) with a larger Jewish audience by writing in Yiddish. One of these was Issachar Bär Teller (ca. 1594–1687).¹⁹ His work, like that of other Jewish physicians at the time, no longer shows much Kabbalah influence, and hence no anthropomorphic notions of God in anatomical illustrations.²⁰ This is also true of Tobias Cohen (1652–1729), who studied in Padua at one of the leading medical faculties in Europe and was even allowed to continue his medical studies at the university in Frankfurt an der Oder, the first Jew to do so.²¹ He is still known today as the originator of the living house metaphor: a visual comparison of the human body with a house containing different rooms and floors.²²

Apparently developed as a teaching tool, Cohen’s model shows at left a man whose fully exposed upper body allows us to see into the body’s interior as in an autopsy. The organs visible are labeled with Hebrew letters. Separated from this image by a scroll bearing a Hebrew text, the right side depicts a four-story house whose attic resembles a human head, that is, clearly anthropomorphic features. Contrary to what has been claimed,²³ it is not absolutely necessary to look to other medical authors or Jewish sources such as the Midrash Rabbah Genesis 24.1 to find precursors.²⁴ The concept of a living house is popular in many cultures,²⁵ and if that image depicts a house with eyes and ears, it stands to reason that the inside of the house might also be imagined as a collection of human organs. The only remarkable thing is that Cohen’s house metaphor aligns him with Jewish tradition, since it draws on the Hebrew Bible-inspired comparison of a person with a city. As proof he cites a passage from Ecclesiastes: There was a small town with few inhabitants, and a great king came to attack it; he besieged it and constructed great siege-works against it. There was in it a poor wise man, and he alone might have saved the town by his wisdom, but no one remembered that poor wise man (Ecclesiastes 9:14–15). For Cohen’s purpose of illustrating human anatomy and physiology with an easily understood image, however, it sufficed to use the house as a term of comparison instead of the larger unit of the city. In addition to the ground floor and attic the individual building has three floors, exactly like the human body whose key component parts are the head, chest, and abdomen.²⁶ As this example shows, Judaism contained not only the widely known image of the living house but also its reverse, the metaphor of a living organism as a building.

Figure 2. Tobias Cohen, Maase Towia. Engraving, 1708. Heb 7459.800*, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

We cannot speak of a specifically Jewish view of the body in this case, even though the learned doctor does try to bring then-current medical ideas into harmony with Jewish tradition and does so without allowing theological interpretations to get the upper hand as they do in the Zohar, for instance. Cohen, who practiced in Constantinople and Jerusalem, saw himself as a doctor first and therefore committed to the medical science of his time. The few religious references in his work may have resulted from his visit to a Polish Talmudic school prior to starting his medical studies in Padua. His work also represents those Jewish doctors and natural philosophers of the premodern period who either rejected or ignored the strict separation of body and mind in the Cartesian model still used today. That would change only in the nineteenth century under the influence of scientific medicine.

Today we also remember another Jewish doctor—and namesake—solely because of the physical model he popularized. This model, however, fits very neatly into the Cartesian worldview.²⁷ Its creator lived a good 250 years later. His name: Fritz Kahn, MD (1888–1968). Between 1922 and 1931 he published a popular five-volume medical work entitled Das Leben des Menschen (The Life of Man). In it he takes the lay reader on a spectacular journey through the human body. Kahn became best known for the poster Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace), which he designed for his book Das Leben des Menschen.²⁸

It shows a cutaway view from the head down to the digestive tract, not in the style of an anatomical diagram, but instead as an illustration of a glass palace with (work)rooms and pipes, conveyor belts and laboratories. The physiological processes in the body are not remotely controlled. Homunculi work everywhere in the different chambers of the human body, using control panels to direct the electrical processes and chemical reactions taking place in the body’s interior. Kahn did not draw himself but instead hired illustrators who helped him depict the human being as machine, showing the circulation of the blood as a system of pipes, the sequences involved in sight and hearing as circuitry, and the digestive process as mechanical-chemical production. The mental aspect, the connection between body and mind, is absent.

Kahn popularized his machine model just as reductionist thinking in medicine was coming under heavy criticism. At the height of his success as one of Germany’s best-known popular scientists, he had to flee because he was a Jew. He lost his medical license, and his books were burned. To the National Socialists, who were eager to establish a New German Medicine, Kahn apparently represented the negative stereotype of the Jewish doctor par excellence. Around the turn of the twentieth century, when Jewish physicians were pioneers in many fields of scientific medicine, making groundbreaking discoveries and enjoying phenomenal success with their treatments, it was difficult for anti-Semitic propaganda to dispute the medical abilities of Jews. The National Socialists therefore accused Jewish doctors of rationalism, lack of empathy, and strong business acumen. The completely industrialized image of the human body that made Kahn and his poster world famous fits this image well. In the United States, the country that finally offered him refuge after a long odyssey, his achievement met with greater appreciation: in 1943 the New York Times published a review of his book Man in Structure and Function (a translated and revised edition of Das Leben des Menschen) that contained the following praise:

Figure 3. Fritz Kahn, Der Mensch als Industriepalast. Poster, 1926. National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD.

The last sections are on the nervous system, the skin and sensory organs—eye, ear, nose—and sex life. In this last it is gratifying to see that Dr. Kahn’s exegesis differs from the school physiologies used by the sage of Baltimore in which ‘all of the abdomen south of the umbilicus was represented by a smooth and quite uneventful surface.’

The text is accurate, detailed, adequate, albeit somewhat plodding. Perhaps it is as well that it should be because its principal purposes [sic] is to furnish an explanation of the illustrations.

…They have the qualities of the wonderful exhibits in the Deutsche Musee [sic] in Munich. I pray nightly that the R.A.F. will spare that. They may have Cologne Cathedral and Potsdam and the Brandenburg Gate and the castles on the Rhine so far as I am concerned if only they leave the Deutsche Musee [sic] intact.²⁹

Kahn is credited with having made complex biological and physical processes comprehensible to a large lay audience. As the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel notes: He was far ahead of his time—decades before scientific programs became popular and Hollywood produced the first films about journeys into the human body.³⁰ A similar wish to illustrate an idea had motivated Tobias Cohen several centuries earlier when he created the image of the human body as house. In contrast to Fritz Kahn, Cohen’s work long remained limited to Jewish circles since even today his book is available only in Hebrew. The fact that it was reprinted multiple times (in 1715, 1728, 1769, and most recently in 1850) nonetheless testifies to how highly regarded his medical compendium remained among readers of Hebrew even well into the nineteenth century.

Body Stereotypes

Certain physical features and character traits ascribed to the Jews, most with negative connotations, have a long tradition as anti-Jewish stereotypes. In some cases, they date back as far as the late Middle Ages, and they are fully developed in the early modern period. These attributes include the allegedly rank odor exuded by Jews (foetor judaicus),³¹ certain physiognomic peculiarities (beard, dark skin, hooked nose), and behaviors supposedly inherited and/or determined by character, such as libido, avarice, miserliness, and deceitfulness.³² At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Frankfurt high school professor Johann Jacob Schudt (1664–1722) informed his readers that—contrary to what Shylock argues in his famous soliloquy—it was indeed possible to tell the difference between a Jew and a Christian: "the character or distinguishing feature of the Jews is in part the body / in part the disposition / in part the way of life / by which we can quickly tell a Jew from a Christian.³³ The (in)famous Jew hater does not leave it at a vague description of distinguishing features, but instead goes into detail: among physical characteristics I count not only the strange beard-pulling of the men / and the women’s covering of their heads / … but [also] the very way the face is formed / so that the Jew protrudes forward /with nose /lips /eyes /also color and entire body posture.³⁴ Personality traits Schudt mentions include self-importance, ingratiating behavior, garrulousness, false subservience, malice, craving for recognition, and hunger for profit. He considers even their distinctive way of speaking—meaning Judeo-German—an additional distinguishing feature. Here, the term language means not only a sociolect that is an identifying feature of a group but also a character trait. Even before Schudt, the Hebrew scholar Johann Christoph Wagenseil (1633–1705) had expressed doubt that identifying markers for Jews (such as the yellow ring) were really necessary, since it was easy to tell Jews from Christians by their behavior and their bodies.³⁵ Toward the end of the eighteenth century, even in educated circles of Enlightenment thinkers the belief persisted that Jews carry with them the mark of their fatherland the Orient to all four corners of the globe." That was at least the opinion of the writer Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751–92), as cited by Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801) in the highly regarded Physiognomische Fragmente of 1787. Lenz explains further: I mean their short, black, curly hair and brown facial color. Lavater, who carried on a lively correspondence with Lenz, then adds: I also count a pointed chin and large lips with a clearly drawn center line as part of the national character of the Jewish face.³⁶

The belief that the Jewish body must be different thus has a long tradition: it is not a conclusion drawn for the first time in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biologistic theories of race. American Judaic scholar Howard Eilberg-Schwartz aptly characterizes the Jews as the people of the body, since to this day it is primarily bodily stereotypes that shape the image of the Jew.³⁷ At the same time, Eilberg-Schwartz notes the double meaning of the term. There can be little doubt that Judaism is itself very body-oriented; we need only look at the 613 commandments an observant Jew should follow in accordance with tradition. In one rabbinical Talmud commentary, for example, we read: Ben Azzai says, ‘Anyone whose body was stricken [with some disease], because of his wisdom it is a good sign for him. [And] anyone whose wisdom was stricken [with some disease], because of his body it is a bad sign for him’ (Tosefta Berakhot 3:5).

The embodiedness (Körperlichkeit) often closely linked to Jewishness turns out to be a double disadvantage, as many examples from its over-two-thousand-year history of persecution and defamation show. First, Jews were criticized for having deficient bodies (the missing foreskin due to circumcision, for instance, but also their susceptibility to certain illnesses and physical abnormalities). And second, Jews were accused of placing too much emphasis on matters of the flesh, in contrast to Christianity, which prided itself on its spirituality.³⁸ The Christian teaching of original sin plays a role in this connection: it is responsible for the corruption of the body and the soul and can be overcome only through baptism, that is, through acceptance of the true faith. Jewish historian Irven M. Resnick gives the following persuasive explanation of how ever since the Middle Ages stereotypes concerning the body have figured in Christians’ perceptions of Jews: "As the principles of physiognomy become systematized and more broadly accepted in medieval culture, Jews will be consistently depicted with physical deformities and associated with disease and illnesses that somehow reflect a persistent sinful state,